Shed No Tears for Paul Ryan

Gary North - April 13, 2018

"I like to think I've done my part, my little part in history to set us on a better course." -- Paul Ryan (April 11, 2018)

Paul Ryan is to the House of Representatives what Alan Greenspan was to the Federal Reserve. Greenspan was a Randian. Ryan was a Randian. Both of them sold out their principles. Greenspan sold out on monetary policy. Ryan sold out on fiscal policy. They both left office proud of what they had accomplished, as far as the public could see.

I do not mince words. In his career as Speaker, Ryan was a sellout. In his career in his years under Bush, he was a sellout. He voted tough only when Clinton and Obama were President. Whenever the Republicans were in power, his career was an ideological capitulation. It was a betrayal of what he had said he was elected to achieve. He came in as a Kemp Republican; he goes out as a Trump Republican. David Stockman has been clear regarding the disaster of Trump's tax cuts. They were not accompanied by spending cuts. They are simply a rerun of Ronald Reagan's tax cuts. Reagan's tax cuts ended mainstream Republicans' credibility with respect to balancing the budget.

There will always be Republican politicians who promise that they will vote against tax increases. They will, but only if a Democrat is President. When a Republican is President, they will vote for his budget. Yet they promise the constituents that they will always vote to balance the budget. They lie. The Republican Party is now the party of perpetual liars. Voting for Republicans to balance the budget is like voting for Democrats to restrain the expansion of the American Empire. It is folly.

I remember a song from the 1952 Democratic national convention.

They promise you the sky.
They promise you the earth.
But what's a Republican promise worth?
Don't let 'em take it away!

The Republicans never took any of the New Deal Away. They expanded it.

CROCODILE TEARS

I am amused to read Politico, a standard Left-wing website. The columnist sheds crocodile tears over the departure of Paul Ryan. In fact, the Left-wing media never had a good thing to say about Ryan. They opposed his rhetoric. Now that he is departing, this columnist laments Ryan's sellout. You can't keep the Left happy. The Left offers this promise to men like Paul Ryan: "You play ball with us, and we will smash you in the teeth with the bat."

Paul Ryan came to Congress as a Jack Kemp conservative and will depart as a Donald Trump Republican.

It’s more complicated than that, certainly. History requires nuance and texture. But legacies are reductive by nature. The House speaker announced his retirement Wednesday, closing a messy and mesmerizing chapter in the history of the Republican Party. And for the affable Wisconsin kid who moved to Washington a quarter-century ago, eager to make his mark on fiscal policy, the harsh reality is that he might be remembered more for accommodating the impulses of the 45th president than for crafting a generational overhaul of the tax code.

This is a political obituary of Ryan’s own writing. His silence in the face of Trump’s indignities—and his observance of “exquisite presidential leadership,” a line that will live in infamy—would be less remarkable had he not first established himself as one of Congress’s good guys, someone whose sense of principle and decency informed his objections to Trump’s candidacy in the first place. Indeed, the speaker’s habit of turning a blind eye to the president’s behavior is relevant and revelatory because it was not always so. There was hardly a tougher Trump critic during the 2016 campaign than Ryan, who felt duty-bound to combat the candidate’s dark rhetoric and the party’s nativist drift. Yet there has hardly been anyone softer on Trump since Election Day than Ryan, who felt duty-bound to deliver on the policy promises made to voters—and decided that doing so meant ignoring the ad hominem savaging of private citizens, the hush-money paid to porn stars, the attacks on private companies, the attempts to delegitimize institutions and the innumerable other acts for which Barack Obama would have been impaled by the right.

The Left is outraged about the looming deficits of the federal budget. Why? Because Trump is President. For Democrats to be outraged about federal deficits makes about as much sense as Republicans being outraged about federal deficits. The only thing that matters to either party is who is in power, and who is going to be in power after the next election. The rest of it is all rhetoric for the rubes back home.

Let's review. In 2012, The New Yorker ran an article on Ryan with a wonderful title: "Fussbudget."

Ryan won his seat in 1998, at the age of twenty-eight. Like many young conservatives, he is embarrassed by the Bush years. At the time, as a junior member with little clout, Ryan was a reliable Republican vote for policies that were key in causing enormous federal budget deficits: sweeping tax cuts, a costly prescription-drug entitlement for Medicare, two wars, the multibillion-dollar bank-bailout legislation known as TARP. In all, five trillion dollars was added to the national debt. In 2006 and 2008, many of Ryan’s older Republican colleagues were thrown out of office as a result of lobbying scandals and overspending. Ryan told me recently that, as a fiscal conservative, he was “miserable during the last majority” and is determined “to do everything I can to make sure I don’t feel that misery again.”

Famous last words. He has presided over the greatest deficit spending budget since the end of World War II. He ramrodded it through the House.

I don't care how miserable he was. I am pleased that he is miserable now. He sold us out. He is now running for cover. He does not want to run for office. He does not want to risk being sacked by the folks back home. It would be too embarrassing.

When the Republicans were out of power, he was verbally hard core. When they were in power, he became silly putty.

In 2009, Ryan was striving to reintroduce himself as someone true to his ideological roots and capable of reversing his party’s reputation for fiscal profligacy. A generation of Republican leaders was gone. Ryan had already jumped ahead of more senior colleagues to become the top Republican on the House Budget Committee, and it was his job to pick apart Obama’s tax and spending plans. At the table in his office, Ryan pointed out the gimmicks that Presidents use to hide costs and conceal policy details. He deconstructed Obama’s early health-care proposal and attacked his climate-change plan. Obama’s budget “makes our tax code much less competitive,” he said, as if reading from a script. “It makes it harder for businesses to survive in the global economy, for people to save for their own retirement, and it grows our debt tremendously.” He added, “It just takes the poor trajectory our country’s fiscal state is on and exacerbates it.”

There is an old proverb: "To test a man's ethics, give him power."

Here is what he used to be, philosophically speaking, according to The New Yorker.

Like many conservatives, he claims to have been profoundly affected by Ayn Rand. After reading “Atlas Shrugged,” he told me, “I said, ‘Wow, I’ve got to check out this economics thing.’ What I liked about her novels was their devastating indictment of the fatal conceit of socialism, of too much government.” He dived into Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Milton Friedman.

In a 2005 speech to a group of Rand devotees called the Atlas Society, Ryan said that Rand was required reading for his office staff and interns. “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand,” he told the group. “The fight we are in here, make no mistake about it, is a fight of individualism versus collectivism.” To me he was careful to point out that he rejects Rand’s atheism.

In 1988, Ryan went to Miami University, in Ohio, where he got to know an economics professor named William R. Hart, a fierce and outspoken libertarian in a faculty dominated by liberals. The two quickly discovered their shared fascination with Rand and Hayek. Ryan got his first introduction to movement conservatism when Hart handed him an issue of National Review. “Take this magazine—I think you’ll like it,” he said.

In 1991, Hart recommended Ryan for an internship in the office of Senator Bob Kasten, a Wisconsin Republican. Two years later, Ryan went to work as a speechwriter and policy analyst for Jack Kemp, who led Empower America, an organization then in the vanguard of making policy for supply-side conservatives who were pushing Republicans rightward in their views on taxes and the size of government. “Jack Kemp is what sucked me into public policy, public service, and politics,” Ryan said. “He called it the battle of ideas, and I just really got into it.”

There is a famous American phrase: "He walks the talk." It is easy to talk a good line. It is difficult to follow it.

Politics is the consummate institutional arrangement in which men talk a good line, and vote against it.

When it comes to the battle of ideas, there have been only been two men in the last 70 years who have served in Congress and who were consistent with respect to denouncing the power of the state and voting against it: Howard Buffett in the late 1940's and early 1950's, and Ron Paul. The rest of them have been hardliners only verbally. They talk a good line, but when push comes to shove, they vote for the expansion of the state. They vote for larger deficits. They sell out the hardliners back home who voted for them because of their rhetoric.

He vainly protests that he didn't want the job of Speaker of the House. The man is shameless. If you don't want a position, don't accept it. William Tecumseh Sherman said it best in 1884: "I will not accept if nominated and will not serve if elected." That was easy to understand.

My favorite example of this outlook is embodied in the words of Ludwig von Mises. Somebody asked him what he would do if he were made dictator of the economy. He had a simple answer: "I would resign." This is always the correct answer.

CONCLUSION

Paul Ryan betrayed every voter who took seriously his rhetoric. I don't care if the voter was in his district or not. If he took Ryan seriously, he has been betrayed. Now Ryan is departing to the catcalls of some people on the Left, the crocodile tears of at least one person on the Left, and to the relief of everybody who knew what he said he believed in, and who then saw what he rammed through the House.

I will paraphrase from Richard Nixon in 1962: we won't have Paul Ryan to kick around anymore. But, I guarantee you, we will have somebody to kick around. When they have power, they don't walk the talk.